Or Whatever. Love, Lark.

 

So, I start on something.

I look at the state of the world and its unfolding and my own progressing years and I think “Maybe it’s time to start seeing what I can do.” I just hit 30 and there’s so much regret and shame still in me from the ghosts of achievements I never earned in my youth. I missed the mark in college, dropped out, still don’t have a degree. That’s a source of shame after my acuity as a young person set the bar high for academic achievement. No degree, no “career” type job or upper-middle class tax bracket, no kids, no home ownership. I’ve got loans I owe for the future I don’t have. And, I don’t care as much about economic stability as I do about personal connections and doing cool things. These days I don’t have as many personal connections. Just one or two or three people I’m comfortable really being open about myself with, if I’m honest. I think about that isolation and start to look at the cool things I’ve done for reassurance – I hitchhiked across the country, I was an eccentric upstart slam poet, I was a railroad track laborer, a queer farmer. That’s most often the ticket to my self-esteem. So I think about it and I want to refresh my memory. Try something new. I think “Well, I’m sort of running out of time already. I’d say there’s about 10 years until we’re in a radically different society because the climate crisis gets out of hand. I’ve personally got a shortening window of my own physical peak condition. Let’s get weird and run 100 miles at once.”

This isn’t a new interest of mine. My dad was a runner. He was competitive as a cyclist, actually. He went to college on a baseball scholarship. He was my sister’s soccer coach. My mom’s brothers are runners still and very serious ones at that, with multiple Boston, New York, and San Francisco Marathon finishes. My dad’s sister won the U.S. Marine Corps Marathon. I was always sort of slow and easily out of breath. I wasn’t gifted athletically and quit track after a season to focus on musical theater. I enjoyed the attention of being on stage even if I hated hearing the sound of my voice. For a while, I tried to keep up with my childhood best friend and then it just dawned me that I never could be in that kind of shape so I gave up.

There was the summer I ran the Colfax Marathon in four hours. Mostly, I was undertrained and it was a battle just to finish. This feels different.

I have big, stupid goals this time. They’re big goals for me but they’re also big goals, I think, for trans women. For queer athletes. For the young ones.

I’m not kidding myself: I know a lot of what I’m going to put myself through is ego driven. But, if I want to grow through the miles and not just shrivel and quit, I know I have consider what this means for my SELF.

On January 3^rd, I had a vaginoplasty. It was a life changing, outlook changing, paradigm shifting procedure. It was also an emotional recovery (and still is) that included two months of no demanding physical activity. On January 17^th, my 30^th birthday, I registered for the Twisted Fork Ultra: a 68 km (42 miles) trail race in Park City. Shortly after, I registered for the Speedgoat 50k, which traverses the hecking Snowbird ski mountain, and the Oregon Cascades 100 mile race from Bend to Sisters.

I’ve watched a lot of running documentaries (there are a ton of them on youtube) and there are quite a few stories about runners coming back to racing after injury or pregnancy. None about a rookie ultra runner coming back from gender affirming surgery.

I don’t want to run 100 miles solely from the mindset of being recognized or creating a story. I feel like it may be important to try and remain focused on growth and becoming someone who is good for the community and a boon for the world.

But. I want to see if I can do it. Maybe even do it well. Whatever “I” am, however consciousness works, what magic guides the cooperative ecosystems ensconced in “my” flesh. I don’t know if there’s an external deity or if the universe is just a brash communal mosh but when I’m feeling idealistic, I think “I’m the universe reflecting itself. I’m the universe trying something out. Hold my beer, watch this. I’m the universe testing a theory. I’m the universe taking a leap of faith. We all are. Aren’t we?” I’ve I’m the universe hypothesizing about possibilities, I wanna see the cool shit. Whether it’s “success” or epic, beautiful “failure”, I gotta see it. I’m gonna try it out. It might get weird. I might try and run three 100 mile races next year or run 200 miles at once. Don’t know. For now, I’m trying to go one run, one moment, one step at a time. And maybe this is where I recap some of those runs. Or I’ll write about “the experience of being transgender.” Or whatever.

Or Whatever.

-Lark